NEW ORLEANS — Trevor Schoonmaker was hopping in and out of Uber cars recently as he raced around this soulful Southern city helping artists finalize works for the fourth edition of Prospect New Orleans, which has turned the entire city into a giant multicultural gallery.

“The installation is the best part — you’ve been talking about the work for so long, and you’re finally seeing it in person,” said Mr. Schoonmaker, the sneaker-clad artistic director of the exhibition, titled “Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp,” on view through Feb. 25.

At one stop, Mr. Schoonmaker was helping hang some of Genevieve Gaignard’s photographic self-portraits at the Ace Hotel New Orleans, where she is presenting work that meditates on race, beauty and cultural identity.

“It’s a watery show,” he said of his concept for “Prospect.4,” which spreads the work of 73 artists across 17 venues and includes Rashid Johnson, Hank Willis Thomas, Njideka Akunyili Crosby and even the jazz legend Louis Armstrong (represented by his collages). Most of Prospect’s $3.8 million budget comes from local and national foundations, and it’s expected to draw more than 100,000 visitors.

With “Prospect.3” in 2014, the event stabilized and morphed from a biennial to a triennial, but it does not have a permanent executive director at present.

“I still think they struggle for resources, but they are on a lot firmer ground than they ever have been,” said Amy Mackie, who runs Parse NOLA, a nonprofit curatorial residency here.

Then there was a last-minute hiccup earlier this month, when Kara Walker, one of the biggest names in “Prospect.4,” had to postpone her piece, “Kataswof Karavan,” until the closing weekend of the show because of the work’s complexity and scale.

Not that viewers will lack for art to see. Mr. Schoonmaker presents dense concentrations of work in four locations: the New Orleans Museum of Art within City Park; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, both in the Warehouse District; and the New Orleans Jazz Museum at the Old U.S. Mint, in the historic French Quarter.

At the Contemporary Arts Center, the artistic duo Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne were puzzling out exactly how to present “Highway Gothic,” which encompasses a series of cyanotype banners printed on 70 millimeter film — with images of crayfish and catfish — and a movie. (The title refers to an official typeface on road signs.)

Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne inside “Highway Gothic,” their multimedia installation on view at the Contemporary Arts Center in downtown New Orleans.Credit
William Widmer for The New York Times

“I want to drink in this color!” Ms. Gallagher exclaimed as she laid out some of the bright blue banners on the floor. She and Mr. Cleijne set about to explore the displacement of both people and animals caused by the construction of Interstate 10, the cross-country freeway that slices through New Orleans and the Atchafalaya Swamp, an enormous wetland, to the west.

Ms. Gallagher called the work an example of magic realism, a story about the highway “as a sick child,” she said. “It registers all the characters that move across it, from the swamp to the city.”

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A detailed view of “Highway Gothic,” which Ms. Gallagher said explores the story of Interstate 10.Credit
William Widmer for The New York Times

The duo — based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Red Hook, Brooklyn — lived on a houseboat in a swamp for a few weeks as they filmed, and Mr. Cleijne had a short take on the experience: “It was a bit scary.”

There are two projects right on the banks of the Mississippi itself: Jennifer Odem’s “Rising Tables” in Crescent Park and, across the river at Algiers Point, Mark Dion’s “Field Station for the Melancholy Marine Biologist.”

Ms. Odem’s piece is a series of antique tables stacked from biggest to smallest at the top.

“It’s about reaching higher ground and stacking for survival,” Ms. Odem, a New Orleans native, said as she looked out at the tankers passing behind her tables. As the water rises seasonally, she added, “The river completes the piece.” Reactions have varied: Passers-by have thought she was selling the tables or drying them out after a refinishing.

Clockwise from top left: Mark Dion outside “Field Station for the Melancholy Marine Biologist,” and interior views of his installation. It takes the form of a research cabin on the west bank of the Mississippi River.Credit
William Widmer for The New York Times

Across the way, Mr. Dion, whose art installations have scientific premises, was painting the inside of a cabin, a temporary structure meant to look venerable, clad in weathered boards and placed on an existing concrete foundation. Its location is the batture, the area between the river and the levee.

“Locals know that no sane person would build here,” Mr. Dion said. “So it must be an artwork. They’re probably hoping it’s a new barbecue joint.”

The artwork’s imagined resident, a scientist, is melancholy because he is “watching the Gulf disappear in front of us, as we all are,” Mr. Dion said. “We have this spectacle of ecosystem collapse. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion.” As if on cue, a mournful ship’s horn sounded.

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Race is one of the crucial fault lines for the work in “Prospect.4,” as it is in the larger contemporary art scene.

Ms. Gaignard, who lives and works in Los Angeles, talked about how she stars in her own photographs, as she installed the show, titled “Grassroots,” in the Ace Hotel.

“My mom is white, and my dad is black — I can pass as white, but it’s not my full story,” she said, noting that her father was from New Orleans. Her installation transforms two adjacent gallery spaces, one with 19th-century furniture and old-fashioned wallpaper and another with church pews. The photographs include “Trailblazer (A Dream Deferred),” with Ms. Gaignard dressed in an antebellum-era bustle dress.

Mr. Schoonmaker said that Ms. Gaignard was among the artists who could break out to larger fame based on her Prospect work. “Much like Cindy Sherman, she’s a shape shifter,” he said. “Except that she’s a race shifter.”

But is a white curator like Mr. Schoonmaker the right person to tackle such issues, especially in New Orleans, where the population is some 60 percent black?

“It’s a fair question,” said Mr. Schoonmaker, who specialized in African art in graduate school and has organized several shows on colonialism and race. He was the curator of “Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey,” the African-born artist’s first American survey, which traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in 2013; and “Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool” (2008). He also edited the book “Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway.”

“I bring voices to the table,” he added.

Mr. Schoonmaker noted that the water theme may have come from a personal wellspring: his North Carolina childhood. “Maybe some of that is just me pouring out my love for the water, growing up around it and fishing and boating,” he said.

The Berlin-based artist Satch Hoyt, whose art addresses how African sounds change as they spread, has worked with Mr. Schoonmaker on three shows previously.

“Trevor is the type of curator who does a massive amount of research — he doesn’t come into town and plunk something down,” Mr. Hoyt said.

His sculpture “Splash, Ride, Crash” is made from 216 cymbals, each representing a musician of the African diaspora. That work is on view at the New Orleans Jazz Museum, as is “Fiend,” a piece by the New York-based artist Rashid Johnson. “Fiend” looks like a large, blocky piece of furniture but is in fact an interactive sound piece.

“It’s a microphone,” Mr. Johnson said. “The performer has to perform to the monolith, to the object. Imagine if you were singing to a Sol LeWitt and it could amplify your voice.”

The metaphor, Mr. Johnson said, was that of speaking out: “Through social media and protest, you see people trying to make sure their voices are heard.”

Curators have to sift through many voices to create international exhibitions. It can be cacophonous at times. Even Mr. Hoyt, who is featured in such shows, said, “Every time I hear of a new biennial I think, ‘Not another one!’” So the leadership of such exhibitions matters to ensure that they remain distinct and necessary.

“I think Trevor can see the forest through the trees, and he’s not subject to what’s popular,” Mr. Johnson said.

“Art has the ability to heal,” he added. But he didn’t think the speaking-up metaphor of “Fiend,” or the rest of Mr. Schoonmaker’s lineup, was going to heal the city’s wounds tomorrow.

“It’s not a social service,” Mr. Johnson said. “My practice has a more philosophical ambition. And over time those ideas may inform practical outcomes.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 26, 2017, on Page AR18 of the New York edition with the headline: Looking Toward Higher Ground. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe